Samantha Burton’s legal battle to appeal a judge’s ruling that confined her to a hospital’s care and, ultimately, the cesarean birth of a her stillborn baby, continues to garner national media attention. The Washington Post reports:
And six months after the pregnancy ended, the dispute over the legal move to keep her in the hospital continues, [...]

ICAN of Greater Cleveland chapter leader Pam Kolanz was featured in an article last week about Ohio’s rising c-section rate. The Plain Dealer reports:
New data on cesarean births in Ohio points to a troubling trend of unnecessary surgeries.
The state’s new hospital-performance Web site, Ohio Hospital Compare, shows that more than one-quarter of first-time mothers considered [...]

Your weekly one-stop for highlights from the birth blogosphere. Visit weekly for the latest on childbirth, especially related to cesarean prevention, recovery, and VBAC. To nominate a blog post to be featured here, email me at blog@ican-online.org
Birthing Beautiful Ideas – Sex After C-Section: The Advice that Women Do (and Don’t) Need: After much controversy in [...]

Ogden Regional Medical Center in Utah recently opened a wing solely dedicated to cesarean births, as reported by the Standard-Examiner:
The C-wing is the first of its kind in Utah, said hospital marketing director Craig Bielik. It includes eight C-section/postpartum suites, single-room maternity care, newborn and transitional nurseries, larger than normal hospital rooms and rooms fully [...]

ICAN mama and chapter leader Christie Craigie-Carter was featured in the Washington Post yesterday:
About 32 weeks into her first pregnancy, Christie Craigie-Carter’s obstetrician told her that the baby she was carrying was stuck in a bottom-down position — a breech baby — and that she’d have to give up her dream of a natural delivery [...]

The UPI reports of a baby born in a car on the shoulder of an Illinois highway today:
An Illinois woman says she and her newborn are doing well after the woman’s boyfriend helped deliver the baby inside a car along Interstate 72.
And…
Holeman said she and her boyfriend, 24-year-old Justin Howell, were driving towards Springfield when [...]

While MSNBC should be commended for it’s recent article on unassisted childbirth, it also joins the ranks of media misrepresentations of the true risks of cesarean surgery. Here’s a breakdown of the article:
On the growing prevalence of unassisted birth:
The number of home births unattended by either a doctor or a midwife jumped by nearly 10 [...]

Media reports this past week have hyped a recent study claiming that induction of labor may actually reduce the need for cesarean. These findings appear to contradict previous research and generally held opinion.
However, these reports have underplayed and under-reported the substantial caveats offered by the researchers about their findings. Although the authors do report [...]